OT: Videos - 747 Retirement Landing & Seneca Gear Collapse

[RudiGreyling]

Hi Guys,

OT: Off Topic, slightly, but it is still aviation related, and I frequent here often.

VIDEO1: Boeing 747 SP Retirement Landing
This past Saturday me and 2 other Microlights flew into a local airport to watch a Boeing 747 SP final landing. What makes this signficant is that the runway is very narrow and short. After landing he will never be able to take off again. The Aircraft will go into a public display museum. Here is my edited video of the show.

Right click and 'save as' to your hard drive before viewing, it is 12MB big.
http://www.rudigreyling.com/movie/bo...ding_small.wmv
Here is a nice picture, that I did NOT take showing the narrow short runway (C) http://www.aviationdimension.com


VIDEO 2: Seneca Gear Collapse
After the Boeing landed we 3 Microlights were on our way back to home base. I took my video camera with to capture the 747 landing. It is typically mounted on my trike.

I was on the threshold midway of runway 35, when the Tower informed the Seneca that its gear did not retract. The Seneca did a flypast and it looked like the gear was down. I had to wait on the threshold midway for all this to pass. Next the Seneca wanted to land, I could go no-where since 2 planes was behind me, midway on 35. I pushed my trike back, motor still running as far as possible away from the runway. There I sit no-where to go....what to do what to do??? I decided to switch on my video camera.

The Seneca did a touch and go and on landing the right gear collapsed right in front of me!
The pilot with awesome skill, picked it up and took off again.
The tower then told him to orbit until they could help.

The tower then told about 6-7 aircraft waiting to take-off, to do so, and clear the airways ASAP.

I got home not knowing what happended to the Seneca, not knowing what I had on video. Later I phoned to rand tower to find out what happened and to get the operators number. I was told they did a succesful forced landing and Lanseria, the aircraft's home, and that nobody was injured.

I looked at my video and saw I got most of it. I phoned the operator to say thank goodness nobody got injured, and that I have a clip on the first attempted landing. I emailed him the video clip.

See the clip, it was point and shoot, but you can clearly see the gear collapse. How the pilot managed to save it I don't know.
I would NOT post this if there was any injury to person, luckily there was none.

Right click and 'save as' it to your computer, it is 1.7MB big.
http://www.rudigreyling.com/movie/gear_collapse.wmv


Regards,
Rudi